meditation one

Since I'm totally mooching off my parental units for a couple of weeks (which has already started to bug me -- I had thought to take a week off and relax and rest and recuperate and all that, but I'm already getting restless; I hate being useless, and I hate even more being dependent), I've tried to make myself useful the last couple of days in turning my hand to cooking.

Dad's on second shift this month, which means that he's not home for dinner, but Mom is; so yesterday I hied myself off to Wegmans, the snootiest supermarket in Erie which boasts good Mexican ingredients and more Indian staples than I could have wildly dreamed, to purchase what I needed to make my good yummy Italian pasta sauce which, as yet, has no name. When Mom arrived home from work, I had fried a pound of bacon and was beginning to chop the onion. So we enjoyed a nice sit-down meal (it's still weird for me to listen to conversation in which I'm participating, instead of sitting down opposite, say, Malcolm Reynolds, Buffy, Seeley Booth, Veronica Mars, Michael Scott or GOB Bluth).

On my return trip from the grocery store, I took all my favorite back roads home -- Depot Road, which rolls steadily down from the Hill (the ridge of the original lakeshore rimming the valley of my hometown) to the valley, and which, if you have no traffic in front of you, allows you to throw the car in neutral and coast most of the three miles or so to Route 20. Unfortunately, I had a student driver learning the fine art of steering ahead of me, who appeared to be afraid of the gas pedal, so I took it upon myself to teach said student how to handle having his tail ridden by an impatient driver behind him -- hey, I wasn't really mad; he might as well learn it from someone who doesn't wish him ill -- but I got around him on Route 20 and from there took Highmeyer down to Route 5, which parallels the lake. Route 5 is annoying to drive if you're going anywhere in a hurry, as it's only a two-lane highway with a lot of curves, but it's certainly one of the most scenic highways in the area, and on a nice overcast cool day like yesterday it was perfect to drive East and see the slate stretch of water on the left, and the smoky bluish green of the Hill brooding in the distance on the right.

I took Route 5 to Freeport Beach, which I had visited the day before; but that was Columbus Day, and sunny, and therefore the beach sported more people than I wanted; I couldn't think freely, and I had wished for a rainy or cloudy day on which to return. God answered that one rather quickly, and so I perched on a driftwood log and stared out over the water.

It was windy, and the usually flat water foamed with whitecaps like the streaming manes of swimming horses, breaking on the beach with the sort of rhythmic roar that draws the mind into stillness. The wind off the water was freezing, and I zipped up my jacket and felt my hair blowing around me and looked off to the west, where the land wades out in a stretch of wooded cliffs and the waves surge on a razor-thin beach of crumbling shale. The trees leaning over the cliff had started their autumnal turning, and in the gray hanging air they shone dimly like coals in mist; above my head the wind had pushed the clouds into ripples that mirrored the waves mirroring the sky below them.

In front of me the lakewater bobbed in strips of brown by the shore and green a little further out before it was swallowed up by the deep solemn blue that ran out to meet the pale horizon; it was too cloudy to see Canada twenty-six miles away. In the foreground, several feet from my log, a gang of seagulls foraged for floating half-rotten foodstuffs dragged to shore by the surf.

I love watching seagulls. For about twenty minutes I sat and looked at them as they beat their wings hard against the eastbound wind to hover staring over the waves; occasionally a gull would grow tired of holding position and bank his wings and let the wind blow him back thirty feet before swooping sharply around. Over and over and over they plummeted against the surface of the water and missed and climbed the air again to wait for the next disgusting piece of debris.

Tirelessly they expended more energy than it seemed they would ever gain by anything they might find; I noticed that the ones who managed to score some slimy dripping thing ate it on the wing. This puzzled me until I saw a bird come up from the whitecaps bearing something a little larger than a minnow. Instantly the gulls surrounding him went on the attack. As the hardworking guy beat feet weaving in and out among the whitecaps flanked by his fellows who would rather reap the benefits of his labor than their own, I sat laughing like a maniac. It reminded me of the time my sister and I were watching a similar tableau and MST3-K-ing the scene, and she squawked, "It's mine, goddammit!"

As the slimy dripping thing changed beaks and the original catcher became an enraged pursuer with a slightly manic air to his wingbeats, I sat up with a start and wondered why I felt strange -- light, empty, quietly hollow; and I realized that I'd passed about fifteen minutes not thinking.

This almost never happens. I went to a Buddhist meditation once and, though I enjoyed it, I left with a headache -- the effort of not thinking cost a great deal. My brain is always busy. My conscious mind never shuts up. I'm usually thinking half a dozen things at once, my trains of thought saskatchewanning around like a heap of spaghetti or the overpasses in Pittsburgh, and to try to make all of that be still...well, then I have to think so hard about not thinking that I wind up thinking all the more.

Of course once I realized I hadn't been thinking I started thinking about not thinking and the train wreck of racing thoughts was off and running, and I found myself reflecting that Freeport Beach is one of the only places, besides that handbuilt bridge in the Alleghenies of New York over the pine-strewn creek I visited on Youth Group retreats twice a year, where not thinking happens naturally. Where the elemental nature of water meeting earth, and water meeting wind, and water meeting sky, brings my frantic mind to a natural stillness, absorbed in watching the union that has taken place in that valley for tens of thousands of years. Where the change is unceasing, and therefore unchanging; where all things cease symbolic meaning and just are, and where past and future only exist in the immutable, the present now.

At the same time I was also thinking that for communal creatures, seagulls are mean little buggers who terrorize, steal from and eat each other, and that it largely seems to be the nature of created things to have no peace.

But my peace had its partial source in their lack of it, and I drew a deep beath of air that felt, for the first time in months, free -- free and laced with that lake smell which I never remember until I smell it again, the smell of churned freshwater and algae and stones and fish. Farther down the western shore a woman threw sticks to her Boston bull terriers, trained, when they brought the sticks back, to give their little twisting leap in the air and put them in her hand; and a scruffy-looking young man stood at the water's edge, staring out over the waves. Down the eastern shore a small knot of elderly folks shuffled over the sand taking pictures of the place where the dark gray of the cloud curtain lifted suddenly over a bright shell-colored haze that did nothing to obscure the water's blue. Watching them, these few people out, like me, on a stormy day to be a part of the rugged, the raw, I thought how different all of them looked, from me and from each other, and how the pull of the lake holds the people, like the land and sky, together.